Beatles Project #3 Please Please Me

Now we’re getting down to business. John calls, Paul and George respond. The first taste of John and Paul getting really serious with their songwriting.

It’s just so much more muscular than Love Me Do. Featuring another Lennon harmonica riff, the repeated come ons, each one slightly more intense and emphatic than the previous one indicate their growing songwriting prowess. Their sense of creating dynamics within the song. It’s lyrically a world away from Love Me Do with it’s single rhyme pattern. Here there is a middle eight that really works in providing a contract to the verses and choruses. In the space of three months they’ve really started to develop their songwriting artistry.

MacDonald suggested in Revolution in The Head they were spurred on by the threat of having How Do You Do It released as their second single and so they came up with something that gave George Martin no sensible option. This song simply had to be released. There was no argument, no competition as to which was the better song. Some Tin Pan Alley pap or this slice of… not quite rock ’n roll, but something that was their very own. But something that generated a real sense of excitement.

The excitement derived from distilling some of that Hamburg/Cavern energy and transferring it to the studio; all the sense of dynamics and structure they’d learned from deconstructing songs to see how they worked – the songs of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Buddy Holly the Everlys and more. The years of struggle, the thousands of hours on stage. It was now all coming together. And it lasted under two minutes. Not quite two minutes of perfection, but they were getting close.

The version they recorded of How Do You Do It is on Anthology 1, but not on-line. The song went to Gerry & the Pacemakers. Gerry took it to No 1 (ironically beating The Beatles to the No1 spot as this record, according to British Hit Singles, only got to No 2), but would that have been remotely possible without the excitement the Beatles generated? Through the credibility and marketability G & the Ps gained through association with The Beatles and their being part of the phenomenon taking the nation by storm called Merseybeat.

I always thought that song was pretty weedy, even as 7 year old. It does beg the question, had that song gone out instead of Please Please Me, would Beatlemania ever have happened and would they perhaps now just be a footnote to a musicological phenomenon that sputtered but never took off in a meaningful way, known as the Mersey Sound? I think The Fabs would have gone on, but their breakthrough to mass acceptance would have taken longer. I’m sure that Please Please Me would have been the B side of this. However had HDYDI been the A side, their relationship with George Martin (and the lesser relationship with EMI) would have been tarnished and so different from what it became. The level of trust between the two sides would have been diminished. If Ringo has never been able to totally forgive George Martin for pushing him off the drum stool for Love Me Do, how would John and Paul have felt towards him had this completely inferior song been foisted on the band instead of Please Please Me?

But that is idle speculation because, in this universe at least, George Martin took the wholly sensible, artistically credible decision to put the right song out to .

Of course the young me of January 1963 had no real idea what they were singing about, (had the Beeb considered just what the girl was being asked to do?) but understanding was the last thing on my mind. It just sounded GREAT. It was exciting and it made me feel good. Would they ever be able to do something as good again?

Fortunately I and the world would find out this was but a beginning, nowhere near the peak of their achievement.

Meanwhile, there were others cutting their teeth on this material. Who would think, watching this, that this bunch would go on in just a few years to be almost as big as The Beatles?

Comments

It grabs you from the first two notes before the harmonica comes in. Apparently it started out much slower, almost as a Roy Orbison type song, but I think George Martin saw the potential of speeding it up.

It is a travesty that this is now not considered to be their first number 1 – it was! The BBC then used a combination of charts to arrive at their list, and it was No 1 in 3 out of 4, but the accepted chart now is the one where it was number 2.

A healthy 33rd, with 349 votes, in the 1983 Beatles Monthly Poll; it had only a few months previously re-charted.

It’s impossible to think how the group could have come up with a more appropriate/”does what it says on the tin” second 45.
This was the one that HAD to be big, and, consequently, the one which paved the way for an L.P. – still not a given for a pop group in 1963.

Therefore, it’s arguably their most important release, and on a par in that respect with “You Really Got Me” by The Kinks and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by The Stones.

It was the point at which Lennon stepped up to the song-writing plate (McCartney was mainly or wholly responsible for Love Me Do and P.S. I Love You). The quality of the songwriting drew the attention of Dick James and led to a publishing deal, Northern Songs. Only the third song in to their career and Brian Epstein, George Martin and Dick James could all see a bright future for them.

This song is probably the earliest example of how much George Martin’s knowledge and advice helped steer The Beatles in the right direction during their formative years; especially in terms of their songwriting.

A lot is made of the two versions of “Love Me Do” but, and I haven’t got them to hand to confirm, my 45 and stereo album versions of this song sounded like completely different takes; something that certainly wasn’t recognised in Neville Stannard’s “Long & Winding Road” discography.

The L.P. track was all over the place and had a fluff in the lyric near the end.
The 45 was much tighter.

Now, had I been a teenager when this was released it would have grabbed me more that “Love Me Do” which I would probably have returned to and my Beatles antipathy could have been so different. A great pop song brilliantly crafted and sung. It’s incredible that I don’t own any Beatles music yet all of these songs are so familiar to the point that under normal circumstance they just become white noise. I’m enjoying this @Carl thanks.

The song. The performance. The drums. The smut. The cheek, the drive, the melody, the harmony… we’re still talking about this? I sometimes get tearful when listening to this lot, because the bands that I grew up watching in the 70s and 80s never came close. Nowhere near. Even watching a video I want to scream.